How the DNC Just Sabotaged Bernie Sanders’ Campaign

In addition to scheduling the Democratic debates to the TV graveyard of Saturday early night to ensure no one can see Bernie take down Hillary, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) just threw another body blow at the Sanders campaign.

As chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Debbie Wasserman Schultz has spent the last eight months using her position to crap on Bernie Sanders. And after what was arguably the biggest week of the Sanders campaign, she may have finally succeeded.

Late Thursday night, the DNC took the drastic step of cutting off the Sanders campaign’s access to its comprehensive 50-state voter file that lists voter patterns and preferences, effectively shutting down the campaign’s voter outreach operations just over a month before the critical Iowa caucus and a little over 50 days before the New Hampshire primary.

The punishment came about as the result of a 30-minute glitch in NGP VAN — the vendor that handles the DNC’s voter data — in which internal models for each Democratic presidential campaign were briefly available to other competing campaigns while NGP VAN was applying a patch to the software. Michael Briggs, a communications aide for the Sanders campaign, said this isn’t the first time they’ve reported security bugs in the DNC’s voter file.

“On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns. Our campaign months ago alerted the DNC to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns,” Briggs said. “At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor.”